Agenda item

Lindsey Ambrose, the Community Engagement and Equalities Officer, told members of the Forum about ongoing work to improve the Council’s performance in relation to equalities.

The single equality scheme was due to end in 2011 and new legal duties introduced through the Equality Act 2010 were a further prompt to create a new equality strategy which all council services would use to guide them and contractors about how to provide fair services.

The document now being consulted on was the draft equality strategy document. It had been developed working with inputs from the Northampton Disabled People’s Forum and Northampton Pensioner Forum. The Northampton Youth Forum would be helping to consult people at community events during the summer.

In response to feedback from council staff, councillors and people in the community, and drawing on best practice elsewhere, the new document would be much shorter than the single equality scheme. Called “Our Approach to Equalities” the new document should be easier to read. It should help everyone to understand how the council worked – in relation to things like procuring services, training staff, talking to and consulting with people, considering the impacts of its policies and practices on people it served and its workforce.

The Council wants services to be embedding and integrating equalities into all their work – not treating it as an “add on” or separate thing. The needs of everyone in the community should be taken into account day to day and in all planning in considering how ways of working affect people etc. All services at the council use service planning templates which guides them to consider equalities, hate crime and accessibility when they are planning their work for the coming year.

The Council’s services are working to the Equality Framework for Local Government. This is a standard which can help them and other people to understand how well they are doing to continually improve how fair and accessible their services are. The Framework recognises three levels of performance:

• Developing
• Achieving – Northampton Borough Council reached this late in 2009
• Excellent.

The Council’s ambition is to have reached the Excellent level by 2013. This requires services:

• To consider the population they aim to serve
• To check that people in that population have fair access to their services
• To find out what impact their services and policies are having on people
• To check that people and partners outside the Council understand that it is committed to equalities and is improving in relation to equalities
• To ensure councillors and council workforce are properly trained and knowledgeable about equalities.

While services may have many different objectives for aspects of their work and Equality Framework progress which together form an overall detailed plan of action, a summary is provided at the end of the “Our Approach to Equalities “ document.

In addition to the “Our Approach to Equalities” document, services will be publishing other information about their specific services: an annually updated report about the workforce and equalities, equality impact assessments, strategies for particular areas of service, for example. The Council also publishes information about its performance online.

The Council needs to agree some priority corporate equality objectives and publish them by April 2012. These should take into account things people in the community tell the Council they feel it needs to work on and other information about people’s needs. So the first part of the Equality Strategy Consultation is happening until 30 September, going out to community events and with documents available to comment on electronically too. It includes asking people about what the Council needs to improve. There is a short survey which some people may prefer to do and a longer survey for people who would like to comment on the drafting of the “Our Approach to Equalities“ document.

The Council will then use the feedback received and further feedback through its annual Corporate Plan and council budget-setting consultation, to identify the equality objectives it will set. It will then publish these by April 2012.

The “Our Approach to Equalities” document will be approved by Cabinet and updated annually.

Documents to take part in the consultation are available at: www.northampton.gov.uk/ourapproachtoequalities.

Further to the meeting
Online versions of the survey forms were added to the web pages. Surveys were conducted at community events such as the Umbrella Fair and Riverside Festival, links were added to the Facebook pages for each of the Northampton Forums and to the main consultation web pages for Northampton Borough Council.

The mentioned first annual report on Northampton Borough Council workforce equality monitoring, with objectives, was published and can be found in the NBC equality web pages at www.northampton.gov.uk/equality .